OK, speaking of hidden features … I didn’t even know about this one until today. Somewhere along the way the console framework development team added support to the Grid view type to copy the data from selected objects in the grid view to the clipboard in TSV (tab separated value) format. From there you can directly paste it into Excel. This works for any kind of Grid view in the console – incident views, computer views, search results, etc.
The reason I call this is a hidden feature is that it is not exposed in the user interface in any way. There are no links in the task pane for this, no options in the menu, no option on the right click menu, etc. Don’t ask me why! :) You can only do this with the standard clipboard keyboard shortcuts – CTRL+C for copy. CTRL+A also works for Select All. So with a couple of quick keyboard shortcuts you can easily dump all the data from a view to Excel - CTRL+A, CTRL+C, ALT+TAB (to switch to Excel), CTRL+V (Paste). Awesome!!
Here is a screenshot showing the data pasted into notepad and Excel from the Service Manager console.
Note : I have no idea when this was added and since I am only testing on RC builds on this point it may only work in an RC build of Service Manager which is coming out very soon…
Microsoft
